A US Coast Guard cutter on Monday unloaded a record haul of illegal drugs that, if it had made it to the streets, would represent around 23 million deadly doses of cocaine, the service said.
The cutter Hamilton offloaded about 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, around 30 miles north of Miami, in what is “the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history,” a Coast Guard statement said. The total value of the seized drugs was put at $473 million.
That’s “enough to fatally overdose the entire population of the state of Florida, underscoring the immense threat posed by transnational drug trafficking to our nation,” Rear Adm. Adam Chamie said in the statement.
The seizures were made in 19 separate interdictions in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea between June 26 and August 18 and involved three US Coast Guard cutters, two US Navy warships and a Netherlands warship as well as Coast Guard helicopter units, US Customs and Border Patrol units, and Joint Interagency Task Force units, the statement said.
Capt. John B. McWhite, commanding officer of the Hamilton, said crews aboard the national security cutter were responsible for seizing “a record 47,000 pounds of cocaine” during the interdiction of 11 “go-fast” vessels, speedy boats used by traffickers to move the drugs to US markets.
The crew detained 34 suspected drug traffickers, it said.
The Hamilton’s on-board drone unit was instrumental in spotting many of the traffickers’ boats, the Coast Guard statement said.
Since January, the Coast Guard has seized $2.2 billion of drugs headed to the US, a service video released Monday said.
“These drugs fuel and enable cartels and transnational criminal organizations to produce and traffic illegal fentanyl, threatening the United States,” the Coast Guard statement said.
President Donald Trump has made the fight against fentanyl one of the top priorities of his administration.
Trump in July signed The Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act, strengthening prison sentences for fentanyl traffickers, which passed both the Senate and the House with bipartisan support.
The president has claimed the illicit flow of fentanyl is one of the underlying reasons for his tariff threats against Canada, Mexico and China.
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